What Is Gluten Really? Find Out Once and for All

Gluten has become like the chupacabra of the food world: It’s got a bad reputation, but you’d probably struggle to describe it accurately if you had to, and few people are sure they’ve even seen it with their own eyes.

Unfortunately, if you do know a lot about gluten, the aforementioned video doesn’t contain any new revelations discovered by the finest gluten scientists working today. However, speaking of science, it does dig into a bit of the actual chemistry behind gluten – tossing out words like “glutenin” and “gliadin” and “covalent bonds” to describe how gluten is formed. It’s just enough to trigger those recurrent nightmares about high school chemistry class you thought you had kicked.

But of course, most of the discussion we hear about gluten these days centers on gluten-free diets and gluten sensitivity. On this subject, Reactions plays it pretty diplomatically. Though some scientists insist that celiac disease is the only proven type of digestive issue associated with gluten, Reactions states that when it comes to non-celiac gluten sensitivity, “It’s all pretty up in the air, but the bottom line is some people feel better after they cut gluten from their diet.” However, though the video doesn’t dismiss gluten sensitively all together, it does try to prevent any additional fearmongering. “If you haven’t been told by a doctor that you have a gluten problem, you probably don’t need to worry about gluten just because it’s trendy to do so.” Next you’re going to tell us we don’t need to worry about the chupacabra until we’ve actually seen it devouring our goats!